16 , _" O.PA ."", . J fb..\ W'::ì3 ' ,. " ::' ,; .þ'V. ;;i (' : '. . . . "."' ... jt.. 1. .' '1 I t -- ... Y' .I .... 1. . dULY 8, I 9 4- .f every night, and wailing as he goes. The last man to die in his parish before a new year becomes the ankou, which means that he is doomed to drive around in a cart with three ghostly companions until relieved by the next year's ankou. Off the Brittany coast is the leg- endary submerged island of Y s, whose church bells can sometimes be heard ringing at night. Since the Bretons, descendants of the ancient Britons, are Celtic in origin, it isn't surprising that their native speech resembles \Velsh more than it does French. They love to sing, like the \Velsh, and, like them, incline to wild, discordant dirges, which they accompany with a set of bagpipes played by two men. They also like to build big bonfires and dance around them. During the American Revolution, Brest was headquarters for the pri- vateers that harassed the English. They were manned by Breton sailors. Duguay- Trouin, an eighteenth-century Breton pirate, once captured the entire city of Rio de Janeiro and held it for ransom. . ((It was a 1lÎce little place with a cl1arn'li1zg, intin'late atn'lospI1ere. I had a really superb poulet sauté Marengo, potatoes bordure, delicious string beans, asparagus tips with a splendid hollandaise, and some of that old-fash- ioned deep-dish apple pie with a mouth-watering hard sauce. T heir ceiling was $2.25 a1zd they charged me $2.50, so I slapped a violation on then'l." farl11ers on the Channel coast have made it as rich as any in France, and they always used to be the first to get their fruits and vegetables to the Paris l11arkets in the spring. The unculti- vated land runs to moors and forests, and there are l11any streams and rivers that end in deep estuaries and inlets- fine natural harbors. The biggest of these is Brest, fourteen miles long and three across, with a bottleneck entrance, and another is Lorient, notorious dur- ing recent years as a menacing Ger- man submarine base. Many old sol- diers remember Brest vividly as one of the principal American debarkation ports during the last war, and an em- barkation port afterward. President \Vilson landed there. It is the French port nearest to North America, a hun- dred and sixty miles nearer than Cher- bourg. The fact that the Bretons have al- ways been conservativé and sectional in their politics encouraged the Germans to try to start a separatist movement after their invasion. In July, 1940, in the town of Pontivy, a Nazi-sponsored meeting was held to proclaim Brittany's secession from France. Only twenty . . Bretons showed up, and the idea fizzled. As any moviegoer can tell you, the Breton fishing fleet has been the biggest single agency in smuggling refugees across the Channel.. Most of the Free French seamen are Breton. Bretons are heavy drinkers, the prewar annual alco- hol consumption of the average Breton (counting men, women, and children) being ten quarts. The Breton sardine fleet, with its hand-dyed nets and sails and its fishermen in red denims, sabots, and stocking caps, inspired probably a good half of the paintings in the Paris museums. Bretons love to wrestle and dig for badgers. They won't bathe or wash their hair when the tide is coming in, and consider it bad luck to use the word "wolf" aboard a fishing vessel. The men play a kind of football called la soule, and at least one village had to forbid the game because so many play- ers got drowned; don't ask us how. Bretons refuse to admit that the dead really are gone. At funeral feasts a place is set for the corpse. If a Breton doesn't l11ake a pilgrimage to the village of St. Servais within his lifetime, his ghost will have to do it for him, carrying his coffin, progressing only the length of the coffin FiJze E ARL Y in the current \Var Bond drive, one of the big Fifth i\. venue stores caught a shoplifter, a well-dressed lady who was obviously just indulging a tendency to kleptomania. The usual policy with first offenders being to scare them and turn them loose, she was re- leased, but not before the bond com- mittee of the store had gently but firmly sold her a thousand-dollar bond. Postwar Editor A MAN we've been talking to, Mr. Emmet Crozier, has spent most of the past year and a half reconnoitring in the postwar world. He holds the posi- tion of postwar editor of the Herald Tribune, and as such has written week- ly articles under the title "The ,V orld Ahead" since the beginning of lVlarch, 1943. The postwar editorship is a job of his own invention and more Of less